A while ago, I saw a reference here to a guide for how to set up networking with the 1.11-series baselayout (written by UberLord?). Now that this baselayout has finally gone stable, I wanted to read that documentation, but I can find it nowhere on the Gentoo web pages.

Can someone post a link? Even better, can it be added to the documentation pages?

Actually you can setup a DHCP server not to provide a default route (gateway) so in that instance you would need one.
But I'll try and put something in explaining DHCP in a bit more detail when I get around to updating it

I have yet another network-related question. Is it possible to set a different MAC address for the same interface in "normal" and fallback mode? I have a laptop which connects sometimes to my desktop, sometimes to my isp; the latter allows only a given MAC address, so I would have to re-register it every time I use the internet from my laptop (updating gentoo on it, mainly).

So, I think of a "normal" mode (connect to isp) with probing for dhcp and setting the MAC to that of the NIC in my desktop machine, and resetting the real MAC of the laptop NIC and set a manual IP in fallback mode (connect to desktop).

Thanks for any help (and for the work on the networking scripts, Uberlord! )

You will be able to do this when we introduce profile support (for whole of the RC system - not just networking), but I'm not sure when that's going to happen.
In the mean time, why not just set the MAC address to that of your ISP requirements for the interface and just leave it at that?

In the mean time, why not just set the MAC address to that of your ISP requirements for the interface and just leave it at that?

Because the MAC my isp wants is that of the desktop NIC, so if I connect the laptop to the desktop, both NICs would have the same hw address

But I'm thinking of a semi-automatic solution now: I will try creating two runlevels ("isp" and "desktop") and checking for it in preup() to set the MAC accordingly... Selection at boot is fine and enough for me.